Empathy for Business

The saying goes, “to walk in someone’s shoes is to understand her.” What most people miss is that there is no way to walk in someone’s shoes if you don’t know what that person is thinking or feeling. Instead, you make assumptions and let those assumptions guide your behavior and decisions. Worse, you don’t realize you’re doing it, which makes assumptions pernicious.

What if you could become more skillful at recognizing and dispelling your assumptions? What if you could gather reliable understanding about how another person reasons, in order to have smoother collaboration and richer creative ideas? Cognitive empathy is about having a curious mindset, interested in understanding how another person reasons. This workshop is not about team-building, conflict-resolution, or culture change. There is no group-sharing. It is about practical abilities that you can develop as a part of your own skillset. You’ll be cultivating abilities that can ultimately bring about a new way of collaborating within your organization.

These skills will also allow you to reframe the way you solve problems for people. When you feed your creative mind with knowledge that reaches beyond the boundaries of your existing thinking, the ideas that bubble up in your creative moments are richer and can influence your organization in a positive direction.

During the workshop, you’ll have a chance to try out the material we are covering. There will be a couple of listening exercises, where you learn to empty your mind and dig deeper into the reasoning going on in another person’s mind.

About the speaker

Indi Young writes articles, conducts workshops and webinars, and speaks about the importance of pushing the boundaries of your perspective.

Indi Young is an independent consultant. She helps teams with person-focused research, product strategy, and experience flow. She has been a trailblazer of experience design since the dot-com boom, using her roots in computer science to help people adopt a neutral, well-considered mindset. In 2001 she was a founder of Adaptive Path, the San Francisco experience design agency. In 2008, her book Mental Models, introducing mental model diagrams, was published. Her second book, Practical Empathy, was released in 2015. She writes articles, conducts workshops and webinars, and speaks about the importance of pushing the boundaries of your perspective. You can follow her on Twitter @indiyoung and access many resources on her website www.indiyoung.com.